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Thunderbird & firefox, which used to work reliably, now (couple weeks) often won't start on rhel6 laptop; rebooting or logging out, back in, fixes temporarily.

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  • Last reply by jrbogart

jrbogart
jrbogart
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I use the redhat distribution and am up-to-date (thunderbird.x86_64 31.3.0-1.el6_6; firefox.x86_64 31.3.0-3.el6_6). Kernel version is 2.6.32-504.1.3.el6.x86_64

Symptoms (logged in under regular username): when firefox or thunderbird command issued to command line: no response to the command, followed by notification of seg fault.

I've tried 

- creating new Firefox profile, copying over only recommended items (e.g., no preference files)

- uninstalling and reinstalling programs via yum


Rebooting the machine always allows me to start up each program at least once. Logging off and logging back in always allows me to start up at least one of them, usually both, but I believe I have seen at least one failure in this case where the second program would not start up.

I have not seen the failure when logged in as root (just to a terminal, not a whole new machine session) but I haven't tried it very often.

My default shell is tcsh and normally the command firefox resolves to /usr/bin/firefox. Issuing the command 

   /bin/sh  /usr/bin/firefox

seems to work somewhat better. Issuing a firefox command in a bash terminal is perhaps better still, but I still do occasionally get the failure even there.

I've checked for protection/access problems, e.g. ownership under ~/.mozilla, but everything seems ok.

I use the redhat distribution and am up-to-date (thunderbird.x86_64 31.3.0-1.el6_6; firefox.x86_64 31.3.0-3.el6_6). Kernel version is 2.6.32-504.1.3.el6.x86_64 Symptoms (logged in under regular username): when firefox or thunderbird command issued to command line: no response to the command, followed by notification of seg fault. I've tried - creating new Firefox profile, copying over only recommended items (e.g., no preference files) - uninstalling and reinstalling programs via yum Rebooting the machine always allows me to start up each program at least once. Logging off and logging back in always allows me to start up at least one of them, usually both, but I believe I have seen at least one failure in this case where the second program would not start up. I have not seen the failure when logged in as root (just to a terminal, not a whole new machine session) but I haven't tried it very often. My default shell is tcsh and normally the command firefox resolves to /usr/bin/firefox. Issuing the command /bin/sh /usr/bin/firefox seems to work somewhat better. Issuing a firefox command in a bash terminal is perhaps better still, but I still do occasionally get the failure even there. I've checked for protection/access problems, e.g. ownership under ~/.mozilla, but everything seems ok.

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jrbogart
jrbogart Question owner
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A little more possibly-useful information:

The system typically gets into a bad state - neither firefox nor thunderbird able to start - after the computer goes to sleep (suspend) when I close the lid. Certain updates also break it. Yesterday I updated some rpm packages without incident, but updating the flash plugin caused problems.